Courion Supports OS/400 Account Provisioning with Identity Suite

by Alex Woodie

OS/400 shops struggling to streamline the management of accounts and passwords for everybody that accesses their servers may want to check out Identity Management Suite 6.5, the latest offering from Courion. The Framingham, Massachusetts, company says the 6.5 release of its Windows software features a 35 percent improvement in the time it takes to process a password-change transaction, as well as new support for provisioning accounts on the OS/400 platform.

Courion's Identity Management Suite is made up of two primary components, PasswordCourier and AccountCourier. As you might have guessed, the goal of each of these components is to lessen the impact that managing user accounts and resetting passwords has on company's human resources and help desk departments. Since setting up user accounts and giving out passwords often go hand in hand, there are benefits to installing these two components as an integrated set, although they will function in stand-alone as well.

Courion first delivered OS/400 support with PasswordCourier in April 2002. At that time, the company delivered an "agent" software called the Password Management Module (PMM) for OS/400 that connected OS/400 servers (via SSL) to the core PasswordCourier application, which houses the administration and authentication capabilities and which runs on Windows NT and Windows 2000 servers.

With the PMM for OS/400, users were able to reset the passwords and synchronize them for applications they use on other supported platforms. For more on PMM for OS/400, see "Courion Now Supports OS/400 with Password Software").

Courion is now rolling out OS/400 support with the other main component of its Identity Management Suite, AccountCourier. This application enables authorized individuals to instantly grant, revoke, or modify account access on any supported operating system, application, and Web portal, without manual intervention.

With last week's announcement, users are now able to automate and centralize much of the work that goes into setting up access to OS/400 applications for new users, changing access for existing users, revoking access for former users, and deleting accounts. Like Courion did with PasswordCourier, OS/400 support in AccountCourier is delivered through an "agent" that sits on the AS/400 or iSeries server. In addition to supporting OS/400 with the 6.5 release, Courion is rolling out support for Oracle8i, Oracle9i, and OpenVMS.

AccountCourier runs on a Windows NT or Windows 2000 server and requires Microsoft's IIS Web server for Windows to front-end the application; Courion is testing other Web servers, such as Apache (which OS/400 now uses). The software connects to a variety of data stores through LDAP and ODBC, and supports applications running on Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Sun Microsystems' Solaris, Hewlett-Packard's HP-UX and Tru64, IBM's AIX, Linux, and Novell NetWare operating systems. It also connects directly to a handful of applications, including Lotus Notes, BMC Software's Remedy ARS and Peregrine's ServiceCenter help desk suites.

Pricing for Courion's Identity Management Suite ranges from $20 to $50 per person. Also included in the suite are ProfileCourier and CertificateCourier. AccountCourier pricing starts at $25 per person. For more information, visit the company's Web site at www.courion.com.

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